David Choe Is it going to be a name that you know completely or one that until now you have eluded your conscious knowledge.
You may have seen Choe in Parts Unknown de Anthony Bourdain next to the chef David Chang, mainly in The Angels. And it is that Choe is an artist whose work consists mainly of figurative paintings that explore themes of trauma, desire, desolation and celebration and are characterized by a messy and frenetic composition that Choe has defined as "dirty style".
Choe was born in Los Angeles of Korean immigrant parents and grew up painting graffiti sprayed in his hometown. After a brief stint through the California College of Art, He began his career as an artist by publishing some graphic novels that he gave away at the Comic Con. Later projects included commissions for murals of Heidi fleiss and an online video series for the magazine Vice call Thumbs Up! where you hitchhiked through North America.
Source: bandit art
However, Choe's fame and fortune came in 2005, when his work caught the attention of Sean Parker, founder of Napster, then president of the future monolithic social networking website Facebook.
Parker asked Choe to paint some sexually explicit murals in the original offices of Facebook en Silicon Valley. Choe has claimed that he despised social media and early versions of it like MySpace and Friendster, which has even led him to call Facebook a "ridiculous and pointless" undertaking, however, Parker offered him $60 or the equivalent in shares of Facebook to paint the murals inside the office,
Of course, no one knew at the time if Facebook would be successful or not, but Parker suggested that Choe take the shares, which she did, and when the shares of Facebook went public in 2012 at $38 a share, Choe's stock was worth more than $200 million, so he not only accepted a project that would open the doors to the rest of the world, but one that would make him a billionaire.
Choe's sketches ooze adrenaline, as if hurtling through creative chaos. She takes a street art aesthetic and modifies it to suit her tastes and mood.
In short, Choe is definitely a cocky, fearless, trash-talking good risk-taker armed with paints and brushes.
Among the works that have had the most echo are the paintings he has done for personalities such as Jay-Z, Linkin Park or even the president of United StatesBarack Obama, for whom he worked during the 2008 campaign.
